Another Label Contributes to Weinberg Discography

Violist Viacheslav Dinerchtein on the cover of his new Weinberg album (courtesy of Naxos of America)

I have discovered that my efforts to become better acquainted with the music of Polish-born Soviet composer Mieczysław Weinberg have been a piecemeal affair. I first became aware of Weinberg through recordings made for ECM by Gidon Kremer, an experience that was reinforced by performance the last time Kremer brought his Kremerata Baltica to San Francisco. Since that time I have gradually built up a library, primarily of Weinberg’s chamber music, that takes in a wide variety of different recording labels.

This week another unique label joined the collection I have accumulated. About a month ago, Solo Musica, which is based in Munich, released a two-CD album of Weinberg’s complete sonatas for solo viola. The product is being promoted as a “special edition” commemorating the centennial of Weinberg’s birth, which is usually recognized as December 8, although there is an added note on Weinberg’s Wikipedia page which makes the case that both the date and the year may be in doubt. However, my personal feeling is that any significant addition to the Weinberg discography is an event worthy of attention, regardless of when the composer was born!

The violist on these recordings is Viacheslav Dinerchtein, who contributes notes to the accompanying booklet. There are also sonata-by-sonata analyses provided by David Fanning. The recordings themselves were made between September of 2015 and March of 2017 in a recording studio in Mexico City. Finally, there are several “endorsement” quotations, the most important of which is probably the one contributed by Kremer, whose experience includes both playing Weinberg’s music (including solo pieces) and conducting ensemble compositions.

While Fanning’s descriptions for the booklet are useful, I feel that I have now had enough encounters with Weinberg’s music to approach new pieces without any prior assistance. From a historical point of view, one of the first things to strike me was that only the first of the sonatas, Opus 107 (none of them have key designations), was composed (in 1971) before the death of Dmitri Shostakovich in 1975. Shostakovich’s last composition was his Opus 147 sonata for viola and piano, completed weeks before his death. As a result, from a purely personal point of view, I tend to listen to the remaining three sonatas Opus 123 (1978), Opus 135 (1982), and Opus 136 (1983) as reflections on Shostakovich’s approach to the viola as a solo instrument. My guess is that those whose knowledge of Weinberg is more comprehensive than mine might dispute that perspective; but I believe that any serious listening experience must begin with a point of departure, even if that point of departure is subsequently rejected as irrelevant!

The performances themselves are consistently clean and polished. Those familiar with other solo-instrument compositions (such as the works for solo cello discussed on this site this past May) are likely to find familiar tropes and rhetorical stances that exploit specific choices of tempo for any given movement. There may also be some sense that, as was the case with Shostakovich, composition tended to be a matter of dealing with the likelihood of some authority looking over the composer’s shoulder in search of “dangerous non-Soviet” thinking. Having had a close brush with a death sentence in the early Fifties, Weinberg could subsequently appreciate the dangers of taking risks. Nevertheless, none of these sonatas show signs of being “government-approved” hack work. They are consistently imaginative and expressiveness, and I anticipate that future listening habits will bring me back to this album frequently.